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>> Friday, November 27, 2009

"All CD-i players except the Portable SONY IVO-V11, Portable Philips 370, DVS DVE-200 and the LG GDI 700 which all used CR2032 batteries which could easily be replaced. Otherwise it's a matter of taking apart the CD-i player once the battery is dead and doing a little DIY to install a replacable battery the hard way! When following guides just make sure not to mix the + with the - and you should be okay."

On the CD-i Forum an ex CD-i developer talked about his experience: "I was a CD-i professional developer. I started as chief engineer for a video-disc manufacturing facility where we were heavily involved with the automotive industries and military which were using laser discs for training. I developed recording technologies, including as an adjunct requirement interactive level 1 and 2 capabilities for video disc. We obtained the Philips CD-i Green Book standards as part of our development of CD/CD-ROM recording capabilities at the time and I was fascinated with Philips vision of a "standard" multimedia system.

When I left there, I started consulting and set up a company to do development of training for automotive companies in conjunction with advertising agencies. They were doing it all on touchscreen / computer / videodisc systems and I bought development systems for CD-i and introduced that to one automotive company. I created a "student course management" system which connected with their satellite-based in-dealer training network through the CD-i serial port and developed proof-of-concept training programs for CD-i and actually obtained and programmed for one of the first MPEG cartridges which hung off the back of the CD-I player with a big fan cooling it - I still have some of those original units. I merged with another development company as CTO and we ended up co-developing hundreds of CD-i professional titles (and a few small educational games as well) for Philips, Chrysler, GM, gaming systems for EDS, Sealy, Sears, etc....

There was rudimentary authoring available (Media Mogul) but I developed my own software using C/C++ on the platform as well as techniques for doing hi-color animations/etc. on the platform to achieve much higher performance in the applications which was a part of getting acceptance - we were able to largely duplicate and better the applications that were being done on multi-thousand dollar videodisc/touchscreen/computer systems on CD-i for around $500 per unit including the MPEG cartridge. These were put into thousands of auto dealerships (and eventually into lots of other professional applications).

We were very disappointed when Philips elected to exit the CD-i business (we were hoping for a next-generation system) but understood the decision. It is amazing that there is still to this day really no open-standard api/accessible/commercial system that can duplicate the functionality of CD-i in a simple package for a low price. I've done a lot of programming of digital signage using embedded linux systems as well with display chips/etc. - better video but the graphics/overlay/performance generally sucks unless they are much more pricey/complicated units."

>> Monday, November 23, 2009

All over the internet you'll find stories where CD-i is titled as the least succesful console, mainly because in the eyes of consumers the amount and quality of games was too low. From a different perspective, the professional market is where CD-i eventually peaked. Especially as tools for education (elementary school, driving license tests, School 2000). In other businesses, you'll find a lot of brands that used CD-i to promote there products in kiosks like we saw with K'Nex a few weeks back. Normally, collectors aren't able to get a lot of these because these discs were only used for promotion. Moreover, they are not published by the same company like Philips media handled most CD-i games. But once in a while a rare title like this pops up on ebay. Like today, with the Volvo CD-i disc. I was aware that Peugeot did a CD-i program at that time but I've never seen it from Volvo too. "Rare Volvo cars Philips CD-I disc. From the ill-fated Philips video disc format... there can't have been many car manufacturers to have done marketing on this format so this is a rare bit of Volvo and Philips history! From memory (not being able to actually view the disc) I'd say 1992/93 which dates it to K reg and the introduction of the 850."
For the coming week, you can find it here.

>> Tuesday, November 17, 2009

There's no harm in thinking what would eventually be possible in CD-i Emulator. The program is getting better and better lately and while there's no DVC emulation yet, cdifan is working on it and he showed some first very primitive progress. Where will it end? Would CD-i Emulator be able to exceed the possibilities of a CD-i player? I was thinking, once The Lost Ride is running in CD-i Emulator, would it be possible to get it to run without the crash bugs it currently has? I remember it depends on the type of player how much the game crashes, on my 490 the game is hardly playable because it crashes so often (while other games run fine). That sounds like the ultimate goal.

Or how about running RAM RAID while cloning the CD-i modem environment so we can again play it online again each other. RAM RAID was the online equivalent of Atlantis: The Last Resort which was released with the second CD-Online disc in 1996. Would it technically be possible to run this online? THAT's the ultimate goal!

>> Monday, November 16, 2009

The upcoming vo.53 release of CD-i Emulator will see the light of day soon: "Finally, I've started putting together the first v0.5.3 beta distribution. It will be mostly identical to a v0.5.2 one, with some updates in the sys directory, updated cdiroms.ini and cditypes.rul files and of course an updated executable which will be named wcdiemu-v053b1.exe (for beta 1) to avoid accidentally overwriting an existing v0.5.2 executable. I've also taken a first crack at a release notes document (very descriptively named BETA1)." This will give us the possibility to capture audio and video from CD-i titles: "I continued working on the WAV / AVI writing front. I have this essentially working now; both types of files are correctly written (the AVI files now include both audio and video). There are new options -writewav and -writeavi to invoke these functions from the command line." More when it develops.

>> Sunday, November 15, 2009

Sebastiaan (Halfblindgamer on youtube) put up a new video review of a CD-i game: This time it's Voyeur that is done. His CDI video series is getting more professional every turn, now with a new intro tune!

Noted as 'Game of the Decade' I agree with Devin that the biggest news today is that Burn:Cycle is now compatible with CD-i Emulator: "Well it's been a long old road but now that CD-i Emulator can operate Burn:Cycle perfectly (Read Here), the ultimate goal of the CDinteractive Support Network has been achieved thanks to CD-i Fan. The next milestone in my view is getting a VCD to play, after that a DVC game like Brain Dead 13. If you can get Atlantis working then I'll pack my bags, job done!" For the full story, see CD-i Bits later today, the night's still young..., according to cdifan.

Emulating Lemmings on both CD-i Emulator and MESS CD-i was a tough job. "No matter what I do, I can't seem to please Lemmings, but it all boils down to the BIOS's communications with the CDIC. I get the feeling it's some kind of timing issue, but I just can't put my finger on it. Currently, in MESS, the "Let's go!" sound effect plays, followed by the sound effect that corresponds to the door opening, then background music starts to play, but dies". Thankfully cdifan worked this issue out in CD-i Emulator and it even improved the compatibility of a lot of other CD-i titles. "Yesterday I did some thinking about the Lemmings sound issue and concluded that the soundmap interrupt timing of the hardware was very different from the one in CD-i Emulator (and MESS CD-i). Today I set out to correct this. A whole lot of titles suddenly work much better or even apparently perfect:

- Lemmings now has background music and appears to play perfectly.
- Burn:Cycle appears to play perfectly.
- The professional title that was my 05140000 crash testcase plays perfectly.
- Sargon plays much better (it has frameskip issues).
- Escape from CyberCity menu screens now work (the actual game doesn't start).
And several soundmixing titles still appear to work okay!"

As CD-i Emulator 0.53 hasn't seen a release yet, I assume these improvements will also be implemented in the next release, which would make a minor update into a big update. Perhaps 0.53 isn't covering all the big updates CD-i Emulator has seen in the past weeks!

>> Monday, November 9, 2009

Forget the last download link: Progress goes fast and this one is even newer: This is a ‘Tiny’ MAME build containing the CDi code from MESS as it is on 28th October 2009 using a fixed gamelist like MAME. Most games will lockup or crash at some point due to imperfectons in the emulation, a couple of them do however play well: Hotel Mario, The Apprentice (no sound), Dimos Quest, Alien Gate, Jokers Wild, Tetris and a number of others seem to be perfectly playable.
Digital Video titles won’t work because MESS doesn’t emulate the MPEG card. For most games only one revision has been added for testing purposes, while multiple revisions
exist in the TOSEC dats. Non-games haven’t been added at all for now. I haven’t marked games as working / not working because most of them haven’t been tested far
enough to make a good judgement on that, the main guarantee this tiny build gives however is that if your CHDs match the expected ones, you’re getting the same results as everybody else; something which is hard to know in MESS which lacks any kind of fixed set list. I (Haze) take no credit for the work here, I’ve just been converting images and testing them. The driver is mostly by ‘Just Desserts / Harmony’ and progress can be followed at the MESS forums. The CHDs used by this should be compatible with future versions of MESS. The package is provided as a ‘tiny’ package which extracts over a full MAME source. Have fun, I don’t personally want any bug reports for this, you’re on your own ;-)Download

Is it me or do these screenshots look very sharp? Ofcourse, I'm used to play CD-i on a conventional CRT screen, and I'm suprised how good these games look!

Multi Emulator Super System (MESS) is an emulator for many game consoles and computer systems, based on the MAME core. Wikipedia explains it at follows: "MESS is not an actual version of MAME, but it has the distinction of being born from, and based entirely on, the same emulation engine as MAME. While MAME emulates several different arcade systems, MESS uses the same architecture as MAME to emulate several different home console and computer systems. In addition to selecting a system to emulate, it is also usually necessary to select a piece of sotfware to work in conjunction with the system."
Now Davind Haywood ported MESS with the 'CD-i build' over to MAME. David: "There are two diff files included, one patches against the current MESS cdi.c file (which you can grab from the MESS SVN if you so desire) This clearly shows which lines need changing to make it work with MAME. The other is a patch against current MAME, containing the current MESS code for the driver. There are still bugs, as expected (they exist in MESS too) but this allows people to see the progress at least, without having to figure out MESS. I take no credit at all for the driver, nor do I want any reports on the instability of the emulation in it! Have fun, and be sure to check out the MESS SVN and update / patch the driver yourself with the diffs included if you want more up-to-date code. Likewise, if you want to add extra games, you’ll have to add them yourself. I may decide to integrate more console systems from MESS into HazeMD at some point, but I’m not decided on that one yet."Click here to read more (including the download link)

Another interesting bit of information posted on the CD-i bits blog today about the first (professional) keyboard for the CD-i. It's the first time I see this on a big picture! It was released in 1993 for use with the professional CD-i player. The later released CD-i KeyControl used a different protocol for transmitting the 'key events'. cdifan posted the background on why this was needed.

>> Saturday, November 7, 2009

MESS version 0.135 is out and includes a very reasonable CD-i emulation (it is not bug-free but neither is CD-i Emulator).

MESS CD-i requires one of the following CD-i system ROM (a.k.a. BIOS) files:

cdi200.rom - Magnavox CD-i 200
cdi220b.rom - Philips CD-i 220 F2
This is because it only handles the Mono-I board and these are the only two CD-i players using that board.

You also need to have CD-i disc images in CHD (Compressed Hunks of Data) format, these can be created from CDI/2352 raw disc images with the chdman tool included with MESS/MAME. If you have disc images in another format (supported by CD-i Emulator), you can use the new CD-i File Extractor tool to convert them to this format; it can even invoke chdman for you.

Public beta versions of CD-i Emulator version 0.5.3, incorporating most of the compatibility bugfixes learned during the MESS effort, will start being released soon.

>> Friday, November 6, 2009

This might be the best CD-i player after all: portable, replaceable battery, great design, including lcd screen. What do you want more? It doesn't require a lot of space either if you are a collector of retro consoles. The only thing is that these portable 370 players are very expensive. And that's because Philips never sold these on the consumer market (apparently except for a small amount in Korea, but who can confirm that!) which was in my opinion a big mistake. These portable players were unique in its kind and I would definately be interested at that time to pick one up. Oh well, look at this baby.

>> Thursday, November 5, 2009

>cdifan just announced keyboard support to the upcoming CD-i Emulator 0.53: "Today I finally added keyboard support to CD-i Emulator, in preparation for the upcoming v0.5.3 release. You can now use the arrow keys and the numeric keypad for movement (the latter allows diagonal movement as well). You can use Space bar and both Enter keys for button 1 and the Shift and numeric keypad "+" keys for button 2; the numeric keypad "-" key acts as button 3 (both buttons simultaneously). I've tested a few games and it seems to work okay."More info here.

We've talked a lot about the CD-i prototypes that have been released by Oldergames/GoodDealgames back in 2002, but always without some proper scans of the boxart. Now, Thanks to Spoonman from Videogameobsession, more high res pictures of his CD-i collection are available. Space Ranger Alpha
Plunderball
Jack Sprite vs. The Crimson Ghost
Go: Special Edition

>> Wednesday, November 4, 2009

There are far more professional CD-i applications compared to the amount of games on CD-i. This is an example of the K'Nex CD-i unit which was used in the Toys 'r US stores in the USA, provided by Videotronic.

I think it's a little difficult to try the MESS CD-i driver ourselves. I'm trying to get a detailed tutorial here on how to get MESS running including the CD-i driver, but I don't have a lot of experience with it yet. With the help of the community though there's enough space to experiment. This post will give you some raw help on where to get the files and how to get starting.
The best start is to look at the MESS Emulator tutorial at Atariage. In this tutorial, they focus on learning to play GCE Vectrex games by using MESS. However, the procedures outlined in this tutorial apply to any of the game platforms that are supported by MESS, including the new CD-i driver.

To play CD-i games by using MESS, you need the following: 1. The latest MESS version. 2. CD-i BIOS ROM. 3. CD-i game ROMs

Then you need to put one of the exact ROM images that MESS CD-i currently supports in the roms/cdimono1 folder; it supports either cdi200.rom or cdi220b.rom. Using CD-i Link (from cdifan's CD-i Emulator) you can obtain the ROM from your CD-i player. Otherwise, google might help you too :).

Finally you need to get one or more chd images and put these in the software folder. You can use chdman (included with MESS) or cdifile (get it here) to create one.

Finally run MessUI and off you go!

Devin: "I like the CHD method of archiving software as well, it really does condense the ISO down saving much needed space on the hard drive. That's probably the one advantage over CD-i Emulator although you can't beat the simplicity and functionality of CD-i Emulator. Doubt this will change either as MESS has to maintain a level of complexity to incorporate all the systems it emulates!"

>> Tuesday, November 3, 2009

CD-i was meant to compete with CD-ROM in the living room and one thing that reminisce to that example is the availability of the trackball and the CD-i. The trackball was the most used controller type in kiosk stands, probably it could be glued to the surface so nobody could steal or ruin it. I remember our local Superclub had four CD-i units ready all with a trackball playing games like Chaos Control and Mad Dog. This is something that stands out from other consoles, because these shooting games were far more accurately controllable using the trackball or the mouse. Even compared to the Peacekeeper Gun which was slower to react, the trackball was the best. Nowadays you don't see these controllers very much, most people are looking for the console-like controllers so they can play the damned Mario and Zelda games. I'd say if you fully want to experience the Peacekeeper Gun games, try to get the CD-i mouse or the CD-i trackball!
Ofcourse, CD-i is more than about the games: The encyclopedias are best controlled with these peripherals as well. At the time the trackball was pretty expensive: 130 dutch guilders. The mouse was priced at 100 dutch guilders.

When everything goes right CD-i Emulator update version 0.53 will be released quickly, according to cdifan. That would mean the latest compatibility updates will be implemented and it's time for us to do new compatibility tests. Moreover cdifan announced some interesting features he is working on, as published in his roadmap on the CD-i Bits blog.
Another confirmation that DVC emulation is in the works. cdifan: "I've been working on support for the Digital Video cartridge. It can currently play the Philips "bumper" movie of a few discs and play some MPEG audio; subsequent MPEG plays have a tendency to crash. This is currently for Gate Array MPEG cartridges only, but the IMPEG/VMPEG cartridges look to be highly similar. It needs to be made more reliable."
One more interesting point to post about is the possibility to save movies from CD-i Emulation. "Support for AVI movie saving has been added using source code from MESS/MAME. This needs a bit of polishing and doesn't currently save audio".
Thanks to cdifan for the news.

>> Monday, November 2, 2009

"RANDOM MUSINGS AND INFO BITS ABOUT THE CD-I RELATED ACTIVITIES OF CD-I FAN, THE AUTHOR OF CD-I EMULATOR." - That's the start of the brand new blog started by CD-i Fan who we all know as the creator of CD-i Emulator. cdifan: "I will try to make regular (but not daily) posts here about whatever I'm doing related to CD-i. That of course includes work on CD-i Emulator, but also on tools (CD-i File comes to mind), interesting information I found out, etc. The last weeks have been fairly hectic, I blame MESS for it :-) The CD-i interest seems to have risen sharply, and I've actually fixed a few CD-i Emulator bugs and added a few features to CD-i Emulator as the result of it."
It sounds like the perfect way to be updated about the developments on CD-i Emulator and the MESS CD-i driver. More when it develops.

"we're sort of leapfrogging on the video decoding" - cdifan
"After fixing the seek issue in CD-i Emulator it looks like this"
No technical updates I found interesting to post, but at least both developments are still rolling. When would we be able to try MESS CD-i ourselves?

Videostores and warehouses often had a CD-i demonstration kit including a touchscreen. Our local hospital also had this Videotronic system offering a preview of the Philips Media Medical Encyclopedia (dutch) on CD-i. This is a unique set of a CD-i 470 player built-in a television with touchscreen ability. Rare, yes! As far as I know, the Videotronic CD-i kit was never sold for the consumer market, and meant purely for demonstration and professional areas. We've seen the grey/black version before on Interactive Dreams, now with new pictures:Note: this material is available at the exchange with this mail:
humeur@orange.fr

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Welcome to the wonderful world of Interactive Dreams. You've just come to a warmhearted place all dedicated to the Philips CD-i. With attention to detail and quality, 2015 should see the rise of CD-i as a Retrogaming platform. For many CD-i has gone as a relative obscurity had it not been for the intervention of websites like The Black Moon Project and Interactive Dreams. Hopefully we're doing our bit to set the record straight along with all the other great CD-i projects.

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